[mudil]

The level of Democratic party and media cooperation is staggering. Media has effectively become a part of the liberal part of the government. The reason Wikileaks scandal got so little attention is because they all, CNN, NYT, etc, are in bed with each other. It's effectively a government-media complex.

Interview with Julian Assange: https://youtu.be/_sbT3_9dJY4

[grandalf]

> a part of the liberal part of the government

It's not actually liberal. In reality it's quite conservative... moneyed, powerful interests shaping the messages that they want the public to consume.

The idea that HRC is politically leftist is a bizarre bit of wizardry that is completely false and helps people who would vote for a leftward leaning candidate believe that she is on their side.

It's arguable whether HRC or George H.W. Bush is further to the right... they are in a similar ballpark... the endorsement is not too farfetched, though normally party loyalty would have prevented it from being made public.

[blfr]

You're just calling whatever you dislike "conservative." Left/right, conservative/liberal are all relative, there are no absolute points of reference. In modern US, GOP represent the conservatives and Democrats are liberals.

Thanks to neoconservatives, some younger people got used to the fact that right wingers are warmongers building global empires* but these are not intrinsically right or conservative views. Plenty of truly hardcore leftists, like Russian communists who were so far to the left of Hillary they would have useless bourgeois scum like her executed, loved war. Socialism is war time economy planning applied in peace time. They wanted a never-ending revolution that spread to the entire world, or at least the English Channel since they were better at manufacturing tanks than ships.

* Well, trying to build global empires while in reality bombing a random stretch of desert.

[oblio]

> They wanted a never-ending revolution that spread to the entire world, or at least the English Channel since they were better at manufacturing tanks than ships.

The Soviet Navy was one of the biggest navies in the world. I don't have the exact numbers, but I'm pretty sure it was #2 in the world, only behind the US Navy.

[douche]

And it would have gotten the ever-living shit knocked out of it in a conventional shooting war with the US Navy.

Saddam's Iraqi army was one of the largest in the world. North Korea still has one of the largest. Quantity doesn't have quite the same quality as in Stalin's day.

[grandalf]

> In modern US, GOP represent the conservatives and Democrats are liberals

This is totally inaccurate. There is a small aspect of the parties' rhetoric that evokes liberal and conservative ideals, but no substantial policy differences.

[skyrw]

This election isn't Liberalism vs Conservatism, it's Corporatism vs Populism.

[grandalf]

I agree... HRC is a corporatist conservative and Trump is a populist conservative.

[briandear]

Neither one is conservative. Conservatism means small, limited government. Classical 'liberalism.'

Both want large expansive governments -- the differences are in how they employ the machinery of government to achieve their ends.

[burkaman]

What Clinton position do you consider conservative?

[grandalf]

HRC only very recently came to support same sex marriage, after it was a sure-fire winning issue. In the past she has called for a wall between the US and Mexico, she uses race baiting language to make white voters feel that she'll be tough on crime, and her remarks justifying neoconservative foreign policy are very disrespectful of the citizens (typically brown-skinned) of the nations the US attacks.

HRC is strongly supported by the banking and finance industry, as well as by essentially all large, establishment industry groups. This is the definition of conservatism, preserving the status quo.

HRC also focuses very much on American exceptionalism and makes a moralistic argument for US foreign policy. She's presided over the largest arms deal in the history of the world, selling US arms to Saudi Arabia.

She wishes for the US to be the world hegemon and to use drone strikes (terrorism) to intimidate and subjugate the (often) brown-skinned people who might try to prevent that.

As we've seen via Wikileaks, HRC has used her and WJC's considerable political influence to amass a fortune exceeding a quarter of a billion dollars. She's advocated most of the economic policies that the super-rich want most. Some of these are, frankly, good policies, but many are handouts and loopholes that help preserve the status quo at the expense of those on the bottom and in the middle.

I would never vote for Donald Trump, but I would also never vote for HRC for many of the same reasons that prevent me from voting for someone like Trump or George W. Bush, etc.

As we've seen with Wikileaks, HRC despises the Sanders voters and strategized not just to sabotage Sanders' candidacy by installing her own cronies in the DNC, but also by pretending to care about their issues while telling banks the opposite. Not only is HRC a political pragmatist, she's on record actively trying to stop the only moderately successful leftist political movement in the US (Sanders) and joking about it to bankers!

Voting for HRC because she's a woman evokes a tribal instinct that is on the same level as voting for someone because they are white. We all want a world of equal rights and we all want to respect powerful, even flawed, leaders whether they are male or female. But HRC goes way too far with the sabotage of Sanders' campaign and the warmongering. Thus I believe voting for HRC (or Trump) is an unconscionable act.

[burkaman]

Most of these are not conservative, they are just things you don't like. Expanding foreign engagement and the military is the opposite of conservatism. Support from established business is a pretty weak argument, she wouldn't be getting nearly as much support if there were an actual conservative in the race. "race-baiting language" and being rich are not conservative positions.

On the American political spectrum, she is not conservative.

Also, you've listed several good reasons to dislike Clinton, but

> Not only is HRC a political pragmatist, she's on record actively trying to stop the only moderately successful leftist political movement in the US (Sanders) and joking about it to bankers!

In what world is pragmatism a bad thing? And what politician doesn't joke about their opponents in private? What human being doesn't joke about their opponents?

[beachstartup]

see: the ruthless domination and assimilation of bernie sanders, the populist-socialist, as indicated in wikileaked emails.

my feeling is if trump wins, it's because of jilted bernie supporters. what happened to all his campaign donations? hmm.

[soundwave106]

One thing I'm personally tiring of in this election cycle is the very strong "media is an xyz conspiracy" narrative; a lot of the reasoning seems nothing more than, gasp, people actually have opinions and bias, and marketing spin is a thing. I don't see spin as a "conspiracy", frankly. There is no such thing as unbiased media, I've never known it ever. Connections are not surprising here either. It's rather puzzling to hear opinion and connections being treated automatically as strong conspiracy.

For the record, liberals these days will tend to say rather the same thing as the above, but substitute Fox News and Breitbart, maybe even the WSJ. There's certainly connections -- Fox News certainly has hired Republican big guns in the past, and Breitbart's executive chairman went on to manage Trump's campaign after all. There's also certainly spin in the other direction. You treat the source accordingly.

Narrative, spin, and marketing will always exist (not just for government and media, but for any organization, from big businesses all the way down to non-profit advocacy groups), it's omnipresent in life. It's a good skill in life to develop a sense for looking past the more egregious forms of marketing and spin in life (the "clickbait" of the web, as it were).

[grandalf]

Well, what makes a journalist good at their job is reporting facts and allowing the reader/viewer to understand as much as possible and formulate a decision.

When journalists are bad at their job they make it very easy to arrive at a particular opinion without really having to understand the issue. This too is the point of PR and of moralistic calls to action... to circumvent rational thought and make someone do something (vote a certain way, buy a certain product, hate a group of people, etc).

[soundwave106]

This is true -- the better journalists and papers actually give you enough facts to allow for meaningful conversation and disagreement. And this really is what we should look for, to separate good quality journalism from tabloid trash, regardless of bias.

From my viewpoint, the New York Times still has a reputation for quality journalism. Very few of the anti-New York Times viewpoints in this thread are terribly convincing to me from that perspective.

[untog]

The Wikileaks DNC scandal has gotten a crazy amount of coverage, particularly given that we're in an election year.